Creativity | A Release from Restriction

Creativity, the spice of life! All I can say is I notice it, when my life is missing a creative outlet. In different times of my life, I have enjoyed a variety of creative outlets…. Cross stitching and painting ceramic pots as a kid on rainy summer days in Whistler, scrapbooking in high school with all the PRINTED photos (I miss those), painting ‘art’ for my bedroom on canvases, taking on the creative challenge of choosing the right colors for adult coloring books…. I have also felt creativity in sport; making a play in basketball or soccer, choosing my route down the hill on my snowboard, playing with speeds on a beautiful bike ride, swimming in a lake. In the last few years I’ve also realized the creative outlet that constructing my blog has given me. Creativity comes in many forms; music, sport, cooking, writing, art, decorating, our personal style, ... A multitude of avenues to feel free, playful, and connected with yourself.

Creating my blog during my time in naturopathic medical school, was a huge relief from the pressure and constant to-dos. I spent so many hours memorizing, regurgitating, repeating on a daily basis… it was the opposite of creativity. In my second year I signed up to do a business course, that focused mostly on online presence and social media. It could have been a bad choice, adding more work to my current workload, but it turned out to be the opposite. It gave me energy. It was probably the first time in my life, that I enjoyed my homework, and spent more time than was absolutely required on it. I loved choosing colors, choosing fonts, choosing a logo, choosing a layout. Mostly, I enjoyed a different style of writing. Writing from my perspective, not regurgitating or quoting facts, but thinking and feeling my way through topics. I would get locked into a zone of writing, where thoughts would flow… I would get inspired by the ideas that would flow and connect. I would walk away from my computer, and day dream about what I had previously been writing about; rewriting sentences in my head and anticipating being able to add the new insights that would come to me. VERY different from my level of engagement and interest in the majority of ‘tasks’ I had to do for school.

When I feel creative, it feels like a state of being that goes completely WITH the grain. A place without the fidgety angst, no fight against the difficulty that discipline and structure often bring. Creativity is freedom; free from rules or restriction. Creativity is learning about yourself; a reflection.

As we age, our lives become more and more about discipline, and less about the creative pursuits we enjoyed throughout our childhood. The constant to-dos can drain our energy, and can cause a big disconnect as we ‘get through it’. Creative pursuits are a great way to get re-connected with yourself, and infuse joy and wellbeing into the dailies. When I make time for the activities that make me feel a sense of creativity, I feel freedom, joy, and inspiration. Keeping these frequencies up, allows for an overflow into the more mundane sense of duty that is part of our lives too. Creativity affords us a greater balance that allows us to take on the rest with more ease of mind.

Creativity is like unbuttoning your pants after a delicious dinner, getting into sweat pants after a day spent in work clothes, it’s coming up for a breath when you’ve been swimming under water, it’s laying on a diagonal in bed; a release from restriction, unbridled, and authentic. Like all of these things, creativity is joy.